What Unifies the Enemies of Civilization?
Socialism, environmentalism, scientism, relativism, dogmatism, and doomerism all have one thing in common.
Arjun Khemani, Logan Chipkin — Oct 11, 2024
This article was excerpted from an upcoming documentary.
Summary: Anti-merit, authoritarian, collectivist ideas like socialism, environmental extremism, and doomerism are enemies of human progress because they impede innovation, limit personal freedom, and prevent societal growth. Fostering decentralized creativity, by contrast, improves the continued ability of human civilization to advance.
We have enemies.
Our enemies are not bad people—but rather bad ideas.
Our enemy is stagnation.
Our enemy is anti-merit, anti-ambition, anti-striving, anti-achievement, anti-greatness.
Our enemy is statism, authoritarianism, collectivism, central planning, socialism.
Our enemy is bureaucracy, vetocracy, gerontocracy, blind deference to tradition.
Our enemy is corruption, regulatory capture, monopolies, cartels.
Our enemy is institutions that in their youth were vital and energetic and truth-seeking, but are now compromised and corroded . . . blocking progress in increasingly desperate bids for continued relevance, frantically trying to justify their ongoing funding despite spiraling dysfunction and escalating ineptness.
Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract dogmas . . . luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable—playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.
Our enemy is speech control and thought control—the increasing use, in plain sight, of George Orwell’s “1984” as an instruction manual . . .
Our enemy is the Precautionary Principle, which would have prevented virtually all progress since man first harnessed fire. The Precautionary Principle was invented to prevent the large-scale deployment of civilian nuclear power, perhaps the most catastrophic mistake in Western society in my lifetime. The Precautionary Principle continues to inflict enormous unnecessary suffering on our world today. It is deeply immoral, and we must jettison it with extreme prejudice.
Our enemy is deceleration, de-growth, depopulation—the nihilistic wish, so trendy among our elites, for fewer people, less energy, and more suffering and death . . .
We will explain to people captured by these zombie ideas that their fears are unwarranted and the future is bright.
We believe we must help them find their way out of their self-imposed labyrinth of pain.
We invite everyone to join us . . .
https://humanprogress.org/enemies-of-civilization/
